Depressive Symptoms Have a Greater Impact on Quality of Life

It can be difficult to function normally in life when faced with bipolar disorder. The challenge intensifies when bipolar is mixed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. When depressive symptoms emerge, the individual’s quality of life is affected.

A recent Medical News report highlights just how important it is to properly screen and treat for both bipolar disorder and PTSD as both can be debilitating conditions. Likewise, both can significantly impair quality of life. Therapists working with such patients may elect to implement psychosocial treatments and consider them critical in the process of improving overall quality of life.

To conduct this research, the team studied information from the Recovery-Oriented Collaborative Care study, a multi-site study of patients with bipolar disorder. The process included collating information on answers to specific mental and physical component subscales and self-reporting on conditions that occur at the same time.

Final analysis from this report showed 44.9 percent of participants were previously diagnosed with PTSD. These individuals were more liable to be female. For those who did receive this diagnosis, Mental Component scores were significantly lower compared with those that did not have PTSD.

The condition was also linked to increased scores for symptoms of depression and higher scores on the Internal State Scale. Plus, patients with a PTSD diagnosis were not as liable to be euthymic as their scores were 20.81 percent versus 36.22 percent for those without the PTSD diagnosis.

In taking in the results overall, researchers concluded that while PTSD had a significant association with lower quality of life mentally, depressive symptoms had a much bigger impact.

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